1. Technical Field
The invention relates to field of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology. More particularly, the invention relates to customer relationship management and, more particularly, to enhancing the customer experience by improving the accuracy and intent prediction capabilities of IVR systems.
2. Description of the Background Art
Interactive voice response (IVR) technology is deployed between a customer and a customer care executive to automate the process of serving the customer at least in part. IVR systems are often criticized as being unhelpful and difficult to use due to their poor design and the fact that they tend to show a lack of appreciation of the customer's needs.
Some IVR-based systems permit customers to speak out the action the customer desires to perform, rather than requiring the customer to push one or more keys to specify the action. Such IVR systems use speech recognition algorithms to recognize the speech of the customer and then perform actions corresponding to the speech of the customer.
Modern systems are very accurate in predicting customer intent based on the customer's speech. The high degree of accuracy exhibited by modern IVR systems results from the use of a very specific grammar, for which the speech recognition system in such IVRs is trained. Because of this, these systems are often referred to as directed voice IVRs. This approach, however, leads to a conflict between the need to provide the customer with the freedom to speak their intent and the accuracy of the system because such systems are restricted to recognizing only the specific set of terms within the grammar for an action. This constrains the customer to speak these specific terms when using the IVR system. Current IVR systems try to balance such conflict and provide a level of service which maximizes the customer experience. However, such systems fail to do so as the customer progresses from a generic description of the problem into specific concerns because of customer directed decision making during the customer's journey. Typically, the customer intent can encompass 30-100 different items. All of these different intents cannot be considered when providing direction to the customer because of the limits to human attention span. To solve this problem, traditional IVRs group these intents hierarchically. Overall, these types of directed conversation have multiple recognition points and, hence, lead to frustration in customers because the customers do not get to solve their problems in the IVR and are, instead, transferred.